I think this confuses the responsibilities a CEO <i>may</i> have (write memos, etc) with the responsibilities they <i>must</i> have (ultimate authority/responsibility for company decisions/direction). If a CEO hired somebody to do ~all company comms, and maybe financial modeling, and even make important decisions about company strategy, the CEO did not hire another CEO. The CEO <i>delegated</i>. All managers do this to some extent, that's the point.<p>There still needs to be some entity who says "here is when we'll listen to the AI, here are the roles the AI will fill, etc", and that entity IMO is effectively the CEO.<p>I suppose you could say that entity is the <i>board</i>, and the AI is the CEO, but in practice I think you'd want a person who's involved day-to-day.<p>The article quotes:<p>> "...But I thought more deeply and would say 80 percent of the work that a C.E.O. does can be replaced by A.I.”...That includes writing, synthesizing, exhorting the employees.<p>If AI replaces those things, it has not replaced the CEO. It has just provided the CEO leverage.
I feel like my CEO is already an AI - gradient descent to optimize stock price for the near future and using as many trending buzzwords as possible in any communications and investor calls.
> “Someone who is already quite advanced in their career and is already fairly self-motivated may not need a human boss anymore,” said Phoebe V. Moore, professor of management and the futures of work at the University of Essex Business School. “In that case, software for self-management can even enhance worker agency.”<p>This idea is as old as the hills. I guess you could call it the "first, we kill all the [middle] managers" approach. It's popular with people who don't really understand how managers help groups of people work together efficiently.
Future CEOs may be like constitutional monarchs. They will be figureheads with some responsibility, but not day to day operational duties.
Over time, as with the King/Queen of England, they will become less necessary.<p>Once AIs are close to doing the job, they have fundamental advantages. They're faster than humans. They have far more network bandwidth. The next frontier is figuring out how to interconnect AIs into a management team.<p>Can AIs use spreadsheets yet?<p>I'm still expecting "Microsoft Middle Manager 2.0" at some point.
I’m imagining a Dilbert comic a company composed of self organized employees, all working from home, with a four day work week and amazing benefits with the comfort of no non competes, taking a long term view on creating shareholder value.
The day that AI can do my job is the day I need to quit. At that point, I'd no longer care if it can replace the CEO of my company.<p>However, I doubt it could replace a CEO. The reason for my doubt is that being CEO is primarily a social job.
The only way this will happen is if the shareholders realize that they can save money, and generate even more profit for them. Perhaps we need to demonstrate this experimentally and compare the results to CEO's in similar industries. Then watch as it is immediately and resoundingly banned through legislation and rhetoric.
The capital markets are a type of AI, or a least a collective intelligence that is optimized for specific, short term outcomes. If you are a CEO of a large enterprise that relies on equity or debt financing, you don't actually have a lot of agency.
My dad really disliked his former boss at his job. He eventually started calling this boss “VPGPT”, since he was quite confident that this boss could be completely replaced with ChatGPT a year ago without anyone even noticing.
At the end of the day, a business still needs a human to sign on the line and be registered with the state.<p>Until I can submit an App ID as a responsible party, I'm guessing CEOs will be here to stay.
If nothing else a company that is more like a collection of independent guilds or co-ops marshaled by a higher AI level would be really interesting. No idea if it would win in the market. Management presumably does a lot of work, somehow, but if you look at their salaries as a budget, is seems like there’s some pretty significant headroom?
Works where archive.is is blocked:<p><a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20240529103000/https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/28/technology/ai-chief-executives.html" rel="nofollow">https://web.archive.org/web/20240529103000/https://www.nytim...</a>
That is the path to saving civilization. Get petty selfish ignorant people out of the decision loop. We are monkey-troop-level thinkers and that puts a hard limit on how complex a civilization we can build. The only way forward is to automate some of this, with the selfishness and clannishness removed.
The article compares CEO's and calculators. If the job of a CEO can be automated, then we each have a CEO in our pocket. Just like we each have a calculator in our pocket. What interesting things would you do if you had Steve Jobs in your pocket?
Of course CEOs can be replaced with AI. Elon Musk proves that it’s not a full time or even a part time job with a solid amount of hours. He “runs” 4 companies and still has time to argue with strangers on the Internet. And he has the gall to ask for a compensation package that equates to $10,000 for each automobile Tesla ever sold.<p>Honestly, let’s just start by replacing CEOs with people who are paid in somewhat of a sane way proportionally. There’s only one CEO job and a handful of senior leader jobs. There are almost certainly far more qualified individuals than there are positions to fill - so why are companies continually giving away their coffers to these executives?<p>Is there really nobody qualified who would jump at the chance to be the CEO of Disney for a modest $5 million/year salary? That would be a dream job for a whole bunch of cast members and imagineers, many of whom have real industry experience and education credentials that would make them qualified.<p>It’s weird to me how companies use obvious supply and demand logic for all the employees except for the executive suite. Is there a shortage of MBA graduates or something? Isn’t it one of the most popular majors?<p>I’ve seen compensation and equity compensation numbers that just look completely insane to me. Companies that have CEOs that make enough money to be equal to 10% of the company’s entire debt load or profit or other crazy huge metrics. In what world is a CEO worth more than reducing the company’s debt by 10% or increasing their profit by 10%? In what world does any individual need to be given compensation that is in the triple digit millions of dollars for <i>anything?</i>
It's both unethical and foolish to outsource meaningful decision making to AI.<p>Use it to support your decision making process all you like, but you shouldn't trust a big opaque ball of matrix arithmetic to make the final call on anything that matters.
CEOs have three responsibilities that I doubt an AI will ever do. 1. Ensure the company has money to operate. 2. Recruit and inspire employees to do their best work collectively. 3. Make decisions where there isn’t definitive supporting data.
Even if an AI <i>could</i> replace CEOs, they won't. The entire point of AI is to allow the capitalist class (CEOs and stockholders) to maximize profits by automating away the cost of employees. The people AI is intended to benefit, who are making the decisions about how and where AI is deployed, are not going to declare <i>themselves</i> surplus to requirements.
> If A.I. Can Do Your Job, Maybe It Can Also Replace Your CEO<p>I'm sorry for the folks who are spreading those rumours. I believe - not only they are non-technical, they lack critical thinking as well. It's not their fault. Each time there comes a new revolutionary technical advancement, we are throwing them into trenches. Then, they are on their own to find and understand - what the hell we have thrown at them.<p>Back in the 80s and 90s, there were some politicians who were spreading similar rumours that Computers are going to take our jobs away. And, where we are now?